


Heartless

by Phoenix_Writes



Series: Mechs Whump [1]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Blood, Gen, Gore, Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt No Comfort, I just thought I should tag it, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Medical equipment, Suicide, The Process Of Mechanization, The death is temporary, Whump, anyway Jonny commits, bad medical practice, but this particular oneshot is just nasty all the way down, good luck you guys, its the mechs tho (actually just one mech) so its never permanent, malpractice, mild body horror, near the end, the comfort will be later in the series I promise, this is Jonny's backstory but make it whump, uhhhhh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:07:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26644975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoenix_Writes/pseuds/Phoenix_Writes
Summary: Jonny's always been bitter. When he meets Carmilla, he's convinced, for once, that life can be better. Be more than booze, furniture polish, and bullets.Edit: I have learned some more Carmilla lore/gotten a better understanding of her (as well as Maki Yamazaki), and some of this fic does not represent my current knowledge of Carmilla's character/the lore and my current headcanons. I'm just too lazy to rewrite this whole fic. Thanks!
Series: Mechs Whump [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1938529
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

Jonny knows the casino floor. Every table, every slot machine, every inch of the well-worn carpet and every bottle behind the chipped oak bar. And he knows Jack, the lanky, greasy proprietor of the place. After six years of this, Jonny knows from across the building that Jack is in the middle of a con. 

Jack sits at a poker table, dealer's chip dancing over his knuckles. His beady gaze sweeps steadily back and forth, back and forth across the players at his table. 

Snagging a whiskey from the bar, Jonny holes up in a corner and watches. The drink will cost him another month, but what's it to him when the rest of his life is forfeit too? 

There - A card flashes up Jack's sleeve, too quick to see for anyone who wasn't looking for it, as he shuffles for the next hand. The players grumble, anteing in. Jack grins. The cards seem to have a life of their own under Jack's practiced ease.

Even after all these years, Jack can't hide the vicious grin victory paints on his face. 

Jack shuffles, deals, palms a card faster than most any eye can follow. 

Jonny's stomach twists. Those men are playing themselves into debt so deep they'll never see the other side of it. 

The hand is dealt. Bets are placed, and a player folds right then, knowing he can't win. Another places a bold bet, and Jonny can't bring himself to feel sorry. It isn't even a good story, these cons. Just math and madness gone wrong. 

It's then that he sees a blond, barrel-chested man eyeing Jack from the nearest blackjack table. The man's clearly losing, his grip on his cards so loose he's bleeding so the whole room can see; the kind of carelessness that comes with alcohol and poor sense. 

That's when Jonny picks up and walks out, headed for the office. He can't do this tonight.

\--

Jack corners him at half past three, playing bouncer on the floor. The blond man has long since left, but Jonny's steering clear of the blackjack tables for as long as he can, hoping that he'll never have to see that jackass again. 

"Got a job for you, boy."

A jolt of shock spears Jonny in the chest. For all that he plays jovial host, Jack is quiet as a ghost when he approaches. 

"Nothing all that new," Jack continues, leaning against the bar. He takes Jonny's drink and swirls the melting ice around and around, never looking down at it. "It's about your father, though. See, he's got himself a little debt..." 

\--

And so Jonny stands in the old tenement house. Rotting carpets and termite-ridden floorboards quiet beneath his feet. Despite this, his father - a blond, barrel chested man with tired, tired eyes - hums in greeting. 

"Knew I'd be back, did you?" 

"Thought you might. Hoped Jack wouldn't make you do it." 

"The way I see it, you's the one who made me do it." Jonny tries for nonchalance, but what he gets instead is a lump in his throat and an acid tongue to hide behind. "When you sold me to him to clear your tab." 

His father nods. Jonny had never learned his name. No, not before the receipt changed hands, and certainly not after, while Jack was grinning like a snake and handing him a loaded gun. He'd learned quick under Jack's care. But if he'd ever known his father's name, he'd long since scrubbed it from his memory. 

There's a gunshot. The pistol's kickback is familiar, as is his grip on the steel. It's easy. 

There's a spatter of warm, wet, red droplets. A thump, and a crunch as skull meets coffee table, and the acrid scent of a cigarette dropped and left to burn. 

Jonny turns. Opens the warped apartment door. Descends the stairs in a regular rhythm, feeling nothing but the cooling blood on his face and the easy weight of the pistol in his hand. 

\--

"You sure, boy? At this rate, you'll be dead by morning." 

Jonny snarls wordlessly, snatching the glass. His capacity for language had long since been deadened by the booze. So he just waves, and the drinks keep coming, and he keeps watching the price tick up, and up, and up. No reason to be careful; Jack would have him til he died, and then he'd be dug up and handed a gun to pay off his debts after death as well. 

He barely noticed, drunk as he was, when a tall woman folded herself down onto the barstool beside him. 

"Manhattan, with ice," she says, and her voice is deep. Tenor, if Jonny were to hazard a guess. Beautiful. 

He stares at her blearily. Watches her throat as she swallows a mouthful of alcohol, turning his own empty glass around and around on the bar. She's the kind of person he'd get lost in for a night, were he slightly less drunk, and one he'd think of for a long time after. 

"See something you like?" 

Jonny can hear the smile in her low, smooth voice. Even if he can't focus properly on the curve of her mouth. 

Instead of trying to dredge up some words, he makes some kind of affirmative sound and picks up his glass, only to find it empty. Disappointment rushes through him. 

"Tell you what," she says, smile still evident in her voice. She turns to him. "Let me buy you a drink, and then get you to bed, hmm?" 

He must be staring at her with shock written clear on his face, because she laughs a sweet, soft laugh. 

"Not like that," she says. Her dark eyes glimmer like liquid in the bad neon lighting of the bar. Jonny thinks he might be drowning. 

After a moment's consideration, he nods. Well, he tries. It's more a slow, spine-cracking tip of his head, but she seems to understand. 

"Lovely. Another whiskey for this fine young man," she calls, and Jonny is lost to the rise and fall of her velvet voice. 

\--

Jonny wakes with a splitting headache. The steady pounding is worse than the bang of a bullet, worse than any beating he'd taken in years. Hell, he'd have taken broken ribs over the red-hot, paralyzing pain. 

It took him a moment to heave himself up. Jack would want him on the floor by ten, looking sober enough to play security until Danny and the boys came in at six. 

"I wouldn't, if I were you," someone says, pressing him back down with a hand on his chest. "You'll only make it worse." 

Her tone is soft. She sounds like she's smiling again, though his head pounds with too much pain for him to open his eyes. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. It's inescapable. He's surprised his brain hasn't dripped out his nose with the blood from whatever fistfight he'd managed to get into the night before. 

The voice - so low and soft he feels like crying just to hear it, though maybe that's the hangover - laughs quietly. 

With considerable effort, Jonny opens one eye. His vision is a little screwy, but he remembers the woman beside the bed, despite how drunk he'd been the night before. 

"Who're you?" It's the best thing he can think to say, past the thick cotton fog in his brain and the pounding headache still clutching him like a vice. 

She laughs again. Jonny can't help but watch her mouth; white teeth and glossy red lips, the barest edge of tongue. There's nothing perfect about her mouth, but something about it draws him in regardless. 

"Carmilla," she says. 

All at once, Jonny realizes that he's probably in her bed. He ignores this. Tells himself he can deal with it later. When he's past the hangover. 

"Jonny," he says in return, gravel in his throat. "Vangelis." 

"Good to meet you, Jonny." 

He hums, gathering up his strength to try and sit up again. 

"Don't even try it," she says, pressing him back down with one hand. She's extraordinarily strong. That, or Jonny's hangover is worse than he thought. 

Jonny lies there, in the beautiful stranger's bed, so hungover he can barely string a thought out to its end. Carmilla presses painkillers and a glass of lukewarm water upon him. 

As the sunlight mixes with the neon outside the window, Jonny has his first coherent thought of the morning: _Jack wants me in for ten._

The second thing he thinks is _fuck Jack._

So he lets Carmilla talk him back into a half-asleep state, and he spends the rest of the morning with a genuine grin playing across his mouth. Later, there will be a conversation. Later, Carmilla will take that little rebellious thought - _fuck Jack -_ and twist it, set him on the path that'll lead him across the universe. 

\--

Jack dies much the same way Jonny's father did; with a gunshot and a spray of hot blood that sticks Jonny's shirt to his skin. His body goes cold at the poker table, throat torn open by the bullet and dripping, ruining the deck of cards still clutched in his hand. 

Jonny comes back with enough kerosene to burn the whole city. He douses everything. The bar. The bottles of shit beer and shit Cyberian vodka and shit scotch, the ratty green carpeting, the tables and the private, high roller rooms. And he sets the whole thing aflame with his last old-fashioned match. 

The heat sears the back of his neck as he crosses the street to join Carmilla. Slipping one hand into his, she pulls him away with that uncanny strength, and Jonny leaves everything behind. 

Despite the heat, her fingers are cold. 

\--

Jonny's scared to die. He admits this to Carmilla that very first night, over some kind of sugary citrus cocktail that gets him fucked up just as fast as the antiseptic burn of whiskey, and she tucks a strand of dark hair back behind her ear before making him an offer. 

He'll say things, later. That he didn't know what it meant, that he was too drunk to understand, that if he'd known.... well, it doesn't matter. It didn't matter then, and Jonny will be the first to admit that it definitely doesn't matter anymore. 

So he follows Carmilla into the bowels of the ship. Lays himself out on the table, metal of the same color as the grip of his gun, and he closes his eyes. 

Carmilla doesn't bother with anesthesia. She pins her hair away from her face, puts on gloves in the barest semblance of proper procedure, and takes a scalpel to his chest. Jonny doesn't know this feeling, but he's been in enough brawls to know the bite of a knife. He knows when the scalpel cuts deeper than he could fix with a plaster or two. He can feel it when Carmilla forces her way through his breastbone. 

She huffs as she pries his ribcage open. Then her hands are pushing themselves _inside_ him. 

How to describe pain like this? Jonny's always been one for words, liked to pick them apart and figure out how they worked, why this line made him ache inside and that one made him laugh. So when Carmilla breaks him open and pushes her cold hands between all the warm, soft insides of his chest, he's suddenly abandoned by the things he'd trusted most. His words.

So Jonny doesn't describe it. He doesn't even try. 

Instead, he screams. He screams his throat raw, screams until he feels something in his throat break and his voice turns ragged, screams until there's blood on his tongue, in his mouth, between his teeth. 

With one hand, Carmilla pins his thrashing wrist to the table. She clicks her tongue in a vaguely irritated fashion, and takes her other hand out of his chest, still covered in his blood. While she straps his wrists to the table, she hums. Her bloody gloves leave slippery handprints all over his wrists. 

Once Carmilla is satisfied, she reaches for a metal shell. It's well formed, the dips and curves looking almost organic. She holds it up for him to see, as though he's not bleeding out with every passing second. 

"Here it is," she says, smiling with obvious pride. "Your immortality." 

Through a gap in the metal, Jonny can see brass tubing behind a layer of complex gears and springs. It looks like a sculpture. It looks dead. 

Then she sets it back down, and as he tries to force enough sound through his ruined vocal cords to tell her to _stop,_ she cuts out his heart.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for a bad pun and some more whump I guess
> 
> Also, until I update the tags, this will serve as your warning for suicide and temporary character death as a result. Be warned.

Jonny wakes up with a steady ticking in his chest and a gun in his face. 

"Good morning," Carmilla says, and shoots him point-blank. 

\--

The rivets of his new heart catch against his lungs. Jonny can feel his blood dripping steadily down the feverish metal, endlessly horrible and fascinating. It's _riveting._ If it didn't hurt quite so much, Jonny would have laughed. 

The steady _tick, tick, tick, tick_ of his mechanical heart keeps him company until Carmilla opens the lab door. He's still strapped down, so when she raises the gun - his own pistol, turned against him - he can't help but lay there and die. 

When the bullet tears a hole through his head, the steady _tick, tick, tick_ of his heart marches on. 

\-- 

By the time his skull has knitted back together, and his brain is more-or-less functioning, Carmilla has long since vanished. The lab is dark and empty, aside from him and the sticky mess at the back of his head. 

It doesn't take him long to discover that the restraints have been removed. The only cuffs he still wears are the bloody handprints Carmilla left behind, and those are brown and flaking. Sitting up and sliding off the table reveals that his left side is less responsive than his right. Which is fine. It fades fast, and by the time he reaches the door, his steps have evened out. 

The hallway, too, is dark. Faint light seeps from beneath a door to the right. 

Jonny turns left and starts walking. His steps don't quite echo, but they resonate in a way that makes him nervous. A hundred instances of _get back to bed_ and _this ain't no place for you, boy_ start running circles in his mind. He keeps walking. 

Every door he tries is locked. The subtle humming of the ship turns sour when he touches anything, though whether it's his imagination or his nerves is impossible to tell. 

Finally, the hallway ends, and Jonny finds himself facing a window so wide it must curve around the whole ship, because he can't see it end. Outside, the stars arrange themselves into a vast silver ocean. 

Outlined in front of him, a void in the soft silver starlight, is Carmilla. 

When she speaks, she doesn't turn around. 

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Jonny can almost hear the soft, satisfied curve to her painted mouth. "In a moment, we'll be able to see New Texas." 

Jonny can't think of anything to say. His wrists itch with his own dried blood. His heart tears at his insides. He can't think of anything to say. 

The edge of a planet comes into view to his left. It's huge and round, glowing like a billion stars stuck to the surface in intricate patterns, and the sun casts a halo of reddish-orange around the atmosphere. 

"Come here, Jonny," Carmilla says. She pats her leg absently, as though calling a dog. 

Jonny steps up beside her. The orange light casts her profile in shadow, but she is still beautiful. The dip of her collarbone looks like marble. 

"How are you finding the view from up here?" 

Jonny swallows, but can't seem to find his voice. 

She looks over at him, rising sun appearing over her shoulder, one eyebrow quirked as if to say _"_ _well?"_

"I... I never knew it was round," he says. 

Carmilla stares at him for a second. Fear coils up in his gut. His face flushes, and he opens his mouth to say he was joking, that's all - 

She doubles over in laughter.

When she stops, a smile sticks to her mouth, and remains visible when she speaks again. 

"How do you feel about taking some medicine? It'll help you adjust." 

He blinks in surprise. 

Before he can answer, Carmilla nods sharply. "Good." 

She turns and walks back out the door. At a loss, Jonny watches his planet cross the window. He genuinely hadn't known. If he'd had a little more emotional bandwidth, he'd have staggered at the thought of what else he might not know. 

As it was, he just stares at the neon planet, distant and so much smaller than he'd ever imagined. 

He doesn't notice Carmilla returning until there's a syringe in his neck, and the world goes dark. 

\--

He wakes up again, and this time he's clean. His ratty, bloody clothes from before are gone. 

It's horrible. He's _too_ clean, rid of the grit and grime of twenty years spent on a shithole of a planet, and it's horrible because he can feel now how much of the dirt is _beneath_ his skin. It's inside him, where nobody can reach. Besides which he can _feel_ how she'd scrubbed him raw, and he could feel her hands crawling all over him. He could feel them inside him. In his skin and the steady _tick, tick, tick_ of his heart. 

He'd rather be sticky with blood and booze, scraping himself off the floor after a rough night and too little sleep. 

The ship hums, a dissonant warning. 

The door slides open, and Carmilla smiles. "Jonny! Good to see that you're waking up - I was getting a little worried about you." 

His skin crawls. Jonny can barely look at her, suddenly noticing how sharp her teeth are, how cold her eyes seem. He wants to scream. 

But he can't. 

\--

The thing about dying is that there's no getting used to it. Every time Carmilla picks up his gun he tenses, fighting off a flinch, and he dies with a sense of overwhelming wet nausea and fear. 

Sometimes death is a driving headache. Sometimes it's puking until his lips crack and his teeth bleed and he can't taste anything but acid and alcohol. Sometimes it's blood all over the floor. 

He never gets used to it. 

\--

The worst part is that he's alone. Carmilla has become less and less like a person and more like a looming shadow, a wraith passing between the lab and the bridge, carrying a portable nav screen and a silicone bag labeled O negative. 

Jonny learns to hide. The ship guides him to the most obscure corners of her ventilation system or the furthest room with life support still running, and he talks to the ship, who can't hear him anyway. She can't talk to him. 

He sings to her anyway; and sometimes he thinks her humming shifts to match his melody. It's probably his imagination. 

\--

Jonny thinks Carmilla has made a game of killing him. She'll turn a corner and shoot him, or he'll wake up to her teeth in his wrist. He'll be dizzy for hours after she does that. 

Her footsteps, rhythmic and quiet, should set the ticking of his heart at double speed. But it just keeps to its steady _tick, tick, tick_ , never faltering for even a moment. He hates it. 

(later, he'll try anything to get its pace to change.)

\--

The first ten years is gone like that. One day his heart stutters, just once, skipping a single beat in the march he's tried to keep himself from getting used to, and Jonny is terrified. As much as he fears eternity, he fears death even more. 

For the first time in years, he seeks out Carmilla. He does it without thinking, blindly rushing to the lab and flinging the door open. 

Carmilla looks up. She's still beautiful and strange, lit from below by the fluorescent lighting on the workbench. There's a broken, mechanical thing there, in pieces as she fits pistons and springs into place. 

"Yes, Jonny?" 

Jonny swallows. The hot rush of fear has abandoned him, and he's left cold in her doorway. 

Finally, he gathers the words enough to have a hope of coherence. "My heart," he says, and stops. He takes a long pause, just to feel the steady ticking in his chest. "It -" 

"Skipped a beat?" 

He blinks. It's been a long time since Carmilla smiled at him like that. 

She drops her gaze back to the parts on the bench. "It'll do that every ten years or so. Every-" she taps a miniature screwdriver to her chin "-what's the bpm...? ah, yes. Every twenty million eight hundred thousand beats, one will skip."

Jonny feels sick, but he has to ask. "....Why?" 

"So you won't get lost. Eternity is a long time, Jonny." She doesn't look up at him. "Think of it as a notification. Another decade you've conquered."

\--

Jonny doesn't sleep that night. He doesn't sleep often anymore, despite how he hated the feeling of exhaustion. Lead for limbs, Jack used to say, waving his gun. A joke and a threat at once. 

Ten years. He's thirty. Thirty, and his body doesn't seem to have aged a day. 

He doesn't know how to feel about that. 

\--

Forever is a long time to be alone. After Jonny finds his gun (polished on the table in the galley, every chamber loaded), he shoots himself when he can't take it anymore. Just to get his brain to shut down for a little while. Just to get some rest. 

Waking up is the worst part. 

\--

Through it all, the ticking of his heart marches on, and on, and on. 

**Author's Note:**

> yeah so I accidentally ended up just a little thirsty for Carmilla.  
> .... oops? 
> 
> Anyway I know some of this is not canon. I know. just roll with it and enjoy the whump. 
> 
> Look. Look. this is absolutely not medically accurate. I did a single google search for the approximate procedure and then made it More Inaccurate.


End file.
